Minnesota budget surplus essay for NPR:  How to spend it?

Paper Machete essay:  What's it like being a liberal Catholic in 2012?  Audio/answer here.

And lastly, a homemade audio bit on the G8 and NATO summits coming to Chicago.  It has to do with some rather... is "autocratic" the word?... severe new right-to-assembly regulations Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wanted to pass.  Our august City Council, thankfully, gave him hell and he largely backed down.  Don't worry.  Satirists like me will keep an eye on this story.

Just one observation:

If a Martian landed in Washington, D.C. and suddenly wound up in the United States Congress at the State of the Union address, he would say, "Ugh, this incessant applause is so annoying.  Politicians do that on my planet, too.  However, you will have to take my word on that since you earthlings cannot see us with your pre-historic 'telescopes'!  HAHAHA!!!"

_

The word “hero” gets kicked around a lot.  We say it so often that we’ve rendered the word meaningless. 

Rose’s Final-Second Heroics Give Bulls the Win, says the headline in the sports section.  I’m gonna destroy this hero, says the hungry man using another term for a submarine sandwich.  Where are my heroes!?!  Wait, duh—they’re right here in my hand, says the guy having a mild stroke who meant to say “keys.”



None of these people is a hero, and I am not either.  I rode my bike seven miles in a snowstorm.  That’s all. 

I did not wrestle a tiger away from a group of toddlers.  I did not take the controls of a 747 after the pilot didn’t feel like landing.  I did not kill Osama bin Laden.   I repeat:  I did not kill bin Laden.  Stop asking.